Actually, Newsletters Are The Real Punk Rock
Just kidding. But thanks for clicking. You're the real punk rock now, dawg.
First off; I know, I am a bad newsletter person. To those of you who pay for this thing, I am very sorry that I’ve been essentially stealing your money by giving you a pathetic FIVE missives this year. I didn’t realize that I’d let standards slip to that extent. Please know that I appreciate you spending your money on my writing. I also find the money very handy, especially since I’m getting cataract surgery next month. Does my insurance cover some of it? Yes. Does it cover all of it?
Hahahahahahaha.
No. It does not. So, even the few hundred bucks a year I make from this newsletter is valued more than you know. Well, maybe not more than you know. It’s not like the concept of money is complicated. So, let me instead say that your financial support is valued exactly as much as you know (and that’s plenty).
And if you subscribe to CREEM, you’re legit keeping a roof over my head and I pretty much think you’re the cat’s meow.
To those who subscribe but who are currently unable to (or just not inclined to) pay, I appreciate your support as well. Just more in the way one appreciates a “u up?” text in one’s early thirties. It’s not the kind of love that results in a white picket fence and private school for the cats, but it does take the edge off. So thank you. And I apologize to you for slacking as well. You and I, we’re in the same boat. I’ve had to cancel a bunch of my subscriptions of newsletters I really like. So, solidarity, comrade. I will endeavor to do better.
In that *extreme Mark Ryan voice* striving for the light, I’m putting this edition of Abundant Living out even though I don’t have an essay in mind. So we’re going to do some capsule reviews, a little music, a little diary, a little cinema. Stuff I’m enjoying, stuff I’m opposite-of-enjoying, and stuff I’m, like, experiencing. It’s a hodgepodge! It’s The Last Few Weeks In Zackosity! HERE WE GO!
(It’s going to be entertaining and useful, I swear. Please don’t unsubscribe. Did I mention that my eyesight is currently akin to a Mr. Magoo?)
Superman (James Gunn, 2025) Despite not having willingly gone to a Superman movie since the Richard Pryor one, I took Zohra to the new James Gunn version. Mainly because all our communist friends were stoked on the film’s supposed pro-Palestine subplot and all our ideological enemies on YouTube and Twitter dot com were seemingly in a tizzy on account of it not being literally Song of the South. Knowing that we were going mainly as a project of enjoying/entering what little cultural cohesion the center-left/left might enjoy in 2025, we kept our expectations reasonable. In doing so, we had a swell time. Despite the movie not seeming to have been written or directed by anyone, it both exists and is enjoyable.
Meaning: There were a couple (2? 3?) genuinely interesting visual elements, some genuinely heartwarming moments, and the praise the film has gotten for how it treats the citizens of Metropolis is deserved (even if various Spidey-Man movies have done the same thing and better). The hope-punk aspects are (obviously) dopey as all HELL*, to the degree where Zohra and I were occasionally the only two people in the theater snorting with laughter. But turns out I’m a sucker cos, by the end, they won me over (a bit) with the whole poster-on-the-wall thing.
Going back to the product at hand, the bright colors and borderline chintzy costumes were a wonderful relief from the tedious anti-life equation schlock that, for over a decade, DC has been foisting on their core audience of no-fap Novemberists and white samurais. Unfortunately, the script was algorithmic enough that some decent AI prompting wouldn’t have been better, but not worse either. There were also multiple scenes that either cinematically resembled a gym sock or I'm pretty sure were just scenes from previous James Gunn movies that he just happened to have lying around.
The acting was good/great (especially Krypto), with old fashioned Hollywood charisma managing to give even the most dead-on-the-page dialogue some life. Three days after seeing it, I don’t recall a lick of the action, but it was, on the Scorsese Scale, a solid “Tea-Cups” level of amusement park excitement (tbc… I really like riding on the Tea Cups). If you like popcorn and big Pepsi, I recommend seeing Superman! I guess!
Oh, as for the film’s politics… It's Wakanda for DSA-ers. In theory, I’m glad that Gunn made it vaguely pro-Palestine (or pro-Ukraine). Certainly beats the alternative. But, in practice (and: SPOILER ALERT), seeing the noble and disheveled Palestine proxies being saved by Guy Gardner of the Green Lantern Corp, while being fully aware of the carnage and war crimes that are daily occurring in real life, with no one stepping in to stop a single one, the whole thing felt garish. After leaving the theatre, with a bit of time spent on each of us waiting to see who was going to broach the topic first, Zohra finally sighed and said, “who was that for?” To be clear again, if the only answer is “people who enjoy watching Ben Shapiro be upset,” both Zohra and I can accept that. We enjoyed that aspect as well, and very much. But the actual experience of seeing such well-intentioned, impotent wish-casting on the big screen was essentially demoralizing.
Maybe Gunn’s intention all along was to cast the viewer as a collaborator in some grand and sickening lib-left decadence, but the soundtrack usage of Noah and the Whale—used instead of the usual classic rock emotional cues, in a scene which was a moving tribute to the exact same scene(s) from Guardians of the Galaxy—doesn’t really suggest an interrogating, let alone subversive, intelligence at work.
Still; that Krypto sure was a cute super dog.
*It’s a topic big enough for another essay but, briefly, while I think Evan Minsker’s newsletter on the film is a true and correct perspective on the issue, I’m far less sanguine than Minsker when it comes to seeing punk as an inherent good. I see it as art, as a style, and—also, yes—a lifestyle (or “community” if you prefer), with all aspects having certain characteristics which make them part of “punk.” While I (completely) agree with Minsker that a corporate-owned intellectual property doesn’t really share too much with any of those aspects (and, sorry kids: unless you’re a literal kid, thinking Superman© is a symbol of any kind of countercultural ethos doesn’t make you a fascist, but it does identify you as a bit of a mark), I can’t even concede the aspirational dogma of Gunn’s script. Punk is indeed all those nice things. I, after all, recently went to the Positive Force 40 Year Anniversary concerts, and that mofo was so relentlessly kind I'm still recovering. Punk is nice. Punk is community. Punk is the punk friends you make on the way to the punk kitchen at the punk house, and punk is the smile on a child's face as they communicate to their parent that "yes, dad, I am enjoying listening to Steady Diet of Nothing."
Punk is also a reactionary movement. A bristling at not just against prog, but also some stuff beloved by groups arguably more oppressed than NOFX fans. Punk is also Siouxsie in a Swastika pin. It's all of Lester Bangs’ buddies described in “White Noise Supremacists.” It's the violence and homophobia found in vast swathes of hardcore (of any era). It's Bad Brains bullying the Big Boys. It’s the misogyny of pop-punk, emo-punk, punk-punk, and all the other hyphen punks. It’s a million other shitty things, starting with just not being disco, and a second chapter so weeble-wobble-y with contradictions that it ruined poor Jimmy Pursey’s brain when he tried to circle the square and keep all the aspects happy. Punk is complicated, y'all. You know, like the Joker!
Punk is great. It’s grand. I love punk, guys! Seriously! It’s endlessly other stuff too, and all the pretzel logic and “no true Scotsman” ahistorical wish-casting in the world won’t make punk’s legacy any less complex/tortured.
So, yeah, fuck it, punk is Superman after all; a freakish and sexy-fetish-geared, prone-to-self-othering-despite-easily-fitting-into-the-mass-culture, hyper-individualistic, preachy, punching machine (with beautiful hair) that you guys keep trying to put blackrim glasses on, as if we didn’t just see the big galoot destroy a city block with his punk breath. As if “Clark Kent, Twee Enjoyer and Good Politics Haver” was what the kids were clamoring for all along.
And that was our inaugural “Hey Kids! Comics!” section. Moving on…
On Thursday, I saw the Mekons (AKA the best critically adored band in the world) at Bowery Ballroom. As I’m profiling the band for the Winter issue of CREEM, I won’t be discussing the show here, except to say that: holy shit. How the fuck are the Mekons still so good??? I was at the show with Ted Leo (AKA a beautiful man, with the heart and voice of an agnostic angel) and he thought it might have been the best he’d seen them. So, if you get a chance to see them on tour, I suggest you do so.
Also, I was excited that they did “Prince of Darkness,” their song written as a semi-loving tribute to Sisters of Mercy frontman Andrew Eldritch. Afterwards I told Tom Greenhalgh that, while interviewing Eldritch last year, I’d almost asked the singer how he felt about the song. Greenhalgh said, “Oh. He does not like it.” For more hot gos from ‘80s Leeds (and what will possibly be 500-1000 word description of a venerable rock critic who was in attendance and wearing khaki shorts), SUBSCRIBE TO CREEM.
The next day (friday) Zohra and I attended day 1 of the On The Streets Again festival. The streetpunk/Oi! Fest, now on its third year (i think… regardless, it’s the third one), is a local/international DIY concern—organized, at great effort and sacrifice of sanity, by a couple of the burlier shining lights of the nuke york illuminati—which brings to our small town some of the best (tuff division) rock and roll bands in the world. The fest is two days proper, bookended by nighttime shows on Thursday and Sunday. Being busy/lazy, I could only make one of the days (despite wanting to see Claimed Choice on the other day… their new album is bonkers good). Being closer to my death than my birth, I wasn’t going to make the entire 2PM-4AM runtime on either day, so I had to plan a bit strategically. Which was made easy by the two bands I most wanted to see, Liberty & Justice and Lost Legion, playing back-to-back on Friday.
Liberty & Justice are a delightful Houston, TX. skinhead/Oi!/ska band who cover both Last Resort and Green Day, have songs sung in Tagalog and songs sung in ‘90s Hellcat, and have a couple Fat Tony features in their catalog. The musicians—aesthetically splitting the difference between “scary” and “daddy”—perform their gravel-throated rock steady in front of a huge banner which sports a skinhead clenching an American flag surrounded by block text which reads “Liberty & Justice, Immigrant Rock and Roll.”
If you’ve read this newsletter before, you know that I am an admirer, outsider, and occasional looky-loo poseur in regards to skinhead and skinhead-adjacent music. I’ve loved Sheer Terror since I was 16, had office chairs thrown at me by 211 members in my twenties, dipped altogether (in favor of stadium crust… I’m not sorry) in my thirties, quadrupled my Ben Sherman consumption in my forties, and now—at fifty—currently love at least 63% of the Nü Oï bands (while also very much enjoying listening to my older skinhead friends talk shit). I don’t think that skinhead music has any obligation to be welcoming, nor do I deny that gentrification has done wonders for the genre’s drum sound. I abhor (and fear!) violence, am deeply grateful for the anti-fash (if, lol, not exactly antifa) messages prevalent in the current scene(s), but also won’t pretend that a general air of sociopathy isn’t part of the appeal. Basically, I’m at least open to shaking my aging hipster tushy to any and every Blitz retread in denim that comes down the pike, but I don’t share the mass-delusion need to pretend that either Conservative Military Image or The Chisel have more than four actual tunes between them. That’s ok. Songs aren’t everything. Sometimes people just want to socialize. And anyway Liberty & Justice have enough tunes for everyone, even those who forgot their choruses in their other sta-prests.
When I bought some merch one of the Liberty & Justice band members said I had “sick style.” I’m fifty goddamn years old and I won’t posture, for even a second, that I’m not still giddily glowing at the compliment.
If Liberty & Justice are one of my favorite current skin bands, Lost Legion are one of my favorite current bands of any genre, in any scene, on any of the planets currently known to either astronomy or astrology. The Chicago outfit came to my attention in 2022 with Bridging Electricity, a three-track EP with songcraft so hooky and tight that I assumed that the first two songs were covers and, when I found out that they weren’t, I momentarily assumed that the Go-Go’s cover at the end was an original. In 2024, Lost Legion put out their debut, Behind the Concrete Veil, which was even better (as I said here and in CREEM).
While not as religiously opposed to the slightest variation from the template as d-beat notoriously is, the genres that Lost Legion work with—hardcore punk, street punk, punk punk, Oi!—are not ones that put a premium on too much originality. I don’t fetishize the new much either. Call a prejudice in favor of small differences, but all I generally ask for is that an artist not be slavish pastiche or, you know, boring. And it’s in the details where Lost Legion excels. Within the steak and potatoes that their audience of professional austerity-measurers demand, subtle (in their fashion) flourishes are to be found everywhere. Sideways-class-consciousness delivered via a voice and lyrics heavy with Motör-esoterics, punctuated by needling/melodic guitar snakes and ladders. Choruses sometimes almost jump ahead of the beat and entire songs approximate implosion w/o falling apart. None of the zigs or zags are so showy as to “transcend the” genre which the band loves in ways both doctrinaire and expansive (while also never quite fitting in).
Plus—in a far more rare distinction for punk—I dig the lyrics. They’re denunciatory and existential, generally about life/traps self-made and born into. The broken-glass tenor that singer/songwriter Ian Wise utilizes might be confused for affectation by those poor saps blackpilled by Dear You or otherwise brainwashed by “natural voice” nerd punkery. But the gravel-emote is a fine traditional folk mode, as passed down to Lost Legion by their pawpaws (Lemmy, Frankie Stubbs, Paul Bearer, Captain Beefheart, Howlin’ Wolf, sea creatures that use the sand on the ocean floor for digestive purposes etc.). And just like those stalwarts, Wise’s voice is simultaneously of that tradition and of his own bad self.
I realize that I might seem to hyperbolize when talking about Lost Legion. In my mind/aesthetic/posture, I’m not exaggerating in the slightest, but I get that I’m setting the band up for a fall by leading the reader to expect a reinvented wheel when the less discerning listener might just hear a meaner Naked Raygun. There might even be a few contrarians out there who think Mozart or whatever is “better” than Pegboy. But what can you do? Rock and Roll is not supposed to be enjoyed by halves. Why should Nicki Minaj’s cult of Barbz have all the fun? When I draw conspiracy lines on my whiteboard that connect Ian Wise singing “the animals we used to be” to the Frank O’Hara poem of (kinda) the same name, am I engaging in Greil Marcus-ian mythmaking? If so, so what? Do we believe in energy or not? When I saw Lost Legion play at the fest—up front with my gal, Jesse Gasface, and a dozen skinheads that looked familiar in that “you either did drugs with me in 2010 or almost made me cry trying to kick you out of the bar in 2006” way—I felt as energized as I did when I was a teenager going to shows. Possibly more so, or at least differently better, as I don’t think I knew it was ok to uncross my arms and smile at shows for the first two thirds of my life. If rock and roll is just a series of stasises laid in a row, then to hell with it; might as well just rebuild the Berlin Wall and call it a day. Barring that, Lost Legion are better than the Beatles. Too far? Tough shit. Saying they’re better than Oasis is too faint praise by a mile, and I’m trying to make my references less niche (eye surgery is expensive blah blah blah).
On Friday night, I introduced myself to Ian Wise and, after gushing at him for a bit, offered to show him and his bandmates around the city the next day, if they liked. On Saturday, Wise and Dylan Piskula (Lost Legion’s thrillingly whizz-bang-y guitarist) dropped by. I brought them to the reflecting pools at Ground Zero. Ian was wearing a Sheer Terror shirt. We glowered at sweet families taking selfies at the graveyard, then we got pizza. Back at the apartment, Zohra, a patriot, made Lost Legion watch forty-five minutes of KLF videos. They seemed to enjoy them. If they didn’t, the pair were gracious enough to not let on*. But, really, who wouldn’t enjoy collective grief, collective forgetting, NYC pizza, and “3AM Eternal”? Nobody, that’s who. Up the esoteric/last train to trancentral punx.
Hey, Kids! New records!
The Native Cats - Aces Low / Lose Count
The Native Cats, AKA the feral felines of Felt-punk, AKA the Tasmanian angels of the morning/mourning, AKA the Hobartian hotsteppers, are back! Bringing with them their patented spiritual ruckus. A-side being a New-Order-Stripped-Bare, bittersweet ‘n’ sweaty one for the nü romantics. B-side being a tuff-tittied, tiny-fist shaker for the back alley baddies who l-u-v said romantics enough to die for them on the first hill they can find.
You think I’m hyperbolic about Lost Legion? Babe, what the Stooges are to punk, the Native Cats are to my loving an underappreciated band beyond measure. Chloe Alison Escott and Julian Teakle don’t just have Christian names straight out of Brideshead Revisited, they have the venom, verve (both linguistic and tonal), and love/hate leanings towards transcendence to match. And their basstone beats the living shit out of anything else Waugh ever did. Buy this and then work your way backwards through the catalog of this finely incisive duo (now trio, at least for this 7”, with the addition of drummer Zac Blain). I look forward to your gratitude.
Ayucaba - OPERACIÓN MASACRE
If Superman is punk then Ayucaba is the spikey jacket that destroyed Krypton.
Thanks for reading.
